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In another “obviously still catching up with my RSS reader” item, here is a contagiously enthusiastic post on Mervyn Peake: The Man and His Art by John Holbo of The Valve (via SFSignal.com).

Peake’s fame rests primarily (and justifiably) on his masterpiece: the Gormenghast trilogy. In Gormenghast, Peake created a fantasy-world unlike any other in literature. Gormenghast is a richly detailed and expertly realized as your Middle-Earths and your Narnias, but is informed by a Kafka-like understanding of the pettiness and empty ritualization of everyday life.

But Peake was also something of a post-war renaissance man who also wrote excellent poetry and, as noted by Holbo, produced wonderful drawings. As a way of twining with Holbo’s post, I’d like to draw attention to Peake’s poetry. My ‘Exhibit-A’ is this bit of war-time verse, “The Consumptive, Belsen 1945”:

If seeing her an hour before her last
Weak cough into all blackness I could yet
Be held by chalk-white walls, and by the great
Ash coloured bed,
And the pillows hardly creased
By the tapping of her little cough-jerked head–
If such can be a painter’s ecstasy,
(Her limbs like pipes, her head a china skull)
Then where is mercy?

I’ve chosen this piece to highlight in particular because I think it counters any potential grumblings by the modernist and post-modernist lovers out there. I’m also a huge fan of T. S. Elliot and Wallace Stevens, but you can’t tell me that Peake is too steeped in Romanticist silliness after reading “The Consumptive, Belsen 1945”—unless you are actually made of some kind of mineral deposit.

I would highly recommend picking up any and all of Peake’s work, but if you know him only by the Titus books, do yourself a favour and find some of his poetry.